Latest in Holland family saga sensational

Here are three exceptionally good novels to get you through the long, hot August days…

Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie: A Holland Family Novel (Grove/Atlantic, 368 pages, $28) is James Lee Burke’s latest addition to the sprawling Holland family saga, which began with 1971’s Lay Down My Sword and Shield and has expanded the family’s history through more than a dozen novels.

It’s 1914, and teenaged Bessie Holland is deeply concerned about the future of her family, what with the oil companies tearing Texas apart. When Bessie kills a man (while defending her father, Hackberry Holland), she’s forced to flee the state.

Bessie winds up in New York City, where she confronts all manner of things she’s never seen, or even imagined (gangsters, for example). Forced to grow up faster than she was expecting to, Bessie draws on her deep reserves of strength to find her place in this new, frightening world, while never losing sight of what’s most important: her family and their home.

This is a wonderful addition to the Holland series, but here’s the thing: you don’t need to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one. Burke writes them as standalones — what you absolutely need to know about the family history, he’ll tell you — and you can jump into the series at any point. So take the plunge, and enjoy.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

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The Monkeewrench series by P.J. Tracy — originally written by the mother-daughter team of Traci and Patricia Lambrecht, and now written solely by Traci — are terrific mysteries set in and around Minneapolis.

Monkeewrench is a software company whose staff, led by the delightful Grace McBride, solve crimes in their spare time, frequently working with a couple of local homicide cops. In The Deepest Cut: A Monkeewrench Novel (Crooked Lane Books, 288 pages, $26), the 11th novel in the series, the Monkeewrench crew faces their deadliest challenge so far.

An escaped killer is on the loose, determined to pay back the people who put him behind bars — which means Grace and her colleagues are in serious jeopardy. There’s only one way to protect themselves: to hunt down the revenge-obsessed killer and put him away before he can carry out his brilliantly fiendish plan.

The Monkeewrench novels perfectly balance character and plot: Grace and the gang are charming and delightful, and the stories are complex and satisfying. You’d have to work really hard not to like this series.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

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Marshall Karp, who turned a two-decade-long career in advertising into a second career as a bestselling novelist, is perhaps best known for the NYPD Red series, which he writes with James Patterson. But he’s also written (solo) a series about a couple of LAPD detectives, Lomax and Biggs, and a few excellent standalones, of which his new one, Don’t Tell Me How to Die (Blackstone Publishing, 350 pages, $30), is by far the best.

Maggie Dunn, who used to be a prosecutor, gets some news that’s very bad, but not entirely unexpected: she’s known for a long time that she might have inherited the fatal disease that killed her mother. Now, with little time left, she’s determined to do something that might sound a little weird: find someone to take her place in the lives of her husband and family. And she’ll stop at nothing to do it.

What makes this novel so good, aside from its eye-catching premise, is the way Karp spins out the story: this is some seriously exquisite plotting, a masterclass in anticipating the reader’s expectations and subverting them at every possible opportunity. A splendid, perfectly executed thriller.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.